Frequency. People bookmark and feed blogs so yours needs to be updated on a fairly regular basis if you want it to gain any long term traction. While daily updates would be great most of us don’t read all of our favorites every day and wouldn’t be able to consume all that content. I suggest getting a post up once a week unless you’re writing extremely informative articles in which case people will wait a few weeks before dropping you from their list.

For example Avinash Kaushik’s analytics blog updates every other week or so but each post is filled with screenshots and actionable resources that takes some serious time to digest so even if I have to wait for an update it’s worth it.

On the other hand GrokDotCom by Future Now updates several times a week and while each post is generally informative, they tend to be shorter in length and something I’ll skim through every few days to catch up on.

If life gets too busy to post for a few weeks it’s always advisable to put up something, even if it’s brief so people know that your blog isn’t dead but really if you suspect you’ll be away or slammed try and craft something in advance and stick to the two week rule.

Relevancy. If all you needed to do to have success was to post something blogging would be easy but with millions of blogs out there (really there’s millions) relevancy and utility is as important as frequency of not more so. This is especially true for corporate blogs where there’s often a lot of “information” to post but very little actual “content” that people want to read. Without relevant content people won’t follow your blog and certainly won’t share it with anyone else thus defeating the purpose. To truly grow your blog needs to go beyond corporate speak or rehashing other people’s content and create.

My thought is that product launches, demos and other promotional items are interesting but really just noise and you should work to maintain that one quality post a week even if you’re adding additional information for marketing purposes far more often.

Starting up. The last thing to consider is actually the first thing in blogging – a new blog. While you can get away with weekly or bi-weekly updates when you start out you need enough information for people to get your message. This means creating a series of articles to either launch immediately or frequently over a few day period.

Next time: Finding inspiration for content when there are no new products or announcements and when creativity starts to dry up.

I know it’s not possible to get enough resources to do everything perfectly but don’t skip one area just to try and make another seem perfect – it won’t work. Instead focus on the big areas of opportunity bit spend some time in the others – court a few bloggers, send a few samples, stay on twitter even if you don’t post a lot, create a facebook page and use it from time to time. This way no matter where someone searches you’re there and as the trends change (and they will change) you’ll already have a foot in that door.

If you run a big, or even just an older brand’s online presence you’ve probably had the “viral” conversation at least once and are downright sick of executives asking you how the company can get more “social”. While a lot of companies have put a great foot forward in building their own communities, this is a difficult proposition and even if it succeeds, it’s only going to reach a small slice of the viral world. The truth is, most user’s live on big networks (social networking sites) and niche sites (the independent forums, blogs, etc…) so let’s talk about some ways to reach out in someone else’s field.

Before I start with specific tactics I’ll begin with a single rule which I consider to be the guiding principle of involving your brand in a community. At all times the community and the user will be in control, not you and not your brand. This goes for external communities and generally for your own as well. Not willing to swallow that reality? Don’t bother trying to get into the space… it will end bad (either a wasted effort or a very bad PR outcome). Why do I say this? Because many, many, many good companies have gone in foolishly thinking they can control the consumer. I don’t care if the consumer is using “your” site or a third party site… if you come in and crash their parade in a way they see offensive (censoring, deleting, spamming, etc…) you’ll have more bad posts going out there than you’ll have time to read and even if there was something erroneously said about you, you’ll have given the poster enough ammo to drive a nail into your name overnight. There’s too many ways for consumers to talk today for you to control them, so don’t bother.

If you’re willing to accept the potential bashing and have a good air conditioner in your building (plus a few sleeping pills), there’s a ton of opportunity to be had to bring people into your customer for the first time, for a repeat purchase, to keep them engaged and simply to grow the reach and awareness of your overall offering.

User Reviews: These days most sites have user reviews if they offer products, so let’s forget on-site reviews for a second and talk about reviews that live off site. Getting involved here is tricky to say the least. You should never be in the business of “seeding” or “faking” reviews but that doesn’t mean you can’t throw some weight in. Got a new product offering?

• Why not having some of your past customer or early adopters get a free sample in exchange for a review. This is an old PR tactic but it works wonders online and even translates out into the blog and forum worlds. Most people never expect a company will notice them and just talking to them can give you a huge response and build a very loyal following.

• Another popular interaction with reviews is to post responses. Some sites clearly allow this (i.e. BizRate) and others may not do so yet, but if there’s a lot of discussion about your offering, now may be the time to ask and/or suggest they do it. When you’re responding to reviews you gain the chance to show that your organization does deliver service and is there for the consumer in the event of a bad review but good reviews are where you can really shine. Use good reviews as a place to respond thanking the consumer, offering ideas and involving them in the brand. When someone reads a good review it’s a positive tick for your business versus the competitors but what if they see you encouraging and supporting that user proactively… what if you suggest more ways for them to use your products that resonate with the reader? Boom. You’ve increased the power of the review.

• Harvest reviews (with permission of course) from sites and include them in your own materials. This works with all types of reviews and is really amazing when taken offline as Walmart has recently done. Harvesting reviews can also be very helpful in building up your own review library initially or just as a means of showing your consumer feedback on truly “independent sites”. You don’t even have to take the reviews to accomplish this… if you have a 5 star product on Amazon say so. They’re independent enough to the consumer and hold great brand weight so why not use that to your advantage?

User submitted video: Again I want to start this tactic with a rule. Video is not applicable to every company, period. Let me clarify that because it’s not accurate perhaps, user generated video is not acceptable in every context but it may be overall. If you’re Boeing airlines, video could be a great way to attract potential employees but that would likely need to come from verified employees, trying to use YouTube to get videos about working at Boeing from the public – not as smart a move.

• Open the doors to video submissions that will make it somewhere. The weight loss industry has used real clients for decades as a means of proving efficiency; online video has made this applicable to everyone. If you have a strong tv brand using video to recruit talent can be an amazing way to build a campaign and save a few bucks on casting. Just think about it, you get the chance to have thousands of people “audition” (with exposure) and the result is that they get to become your star, or one of your stars, or just a star you push over to PR for coverage. Either way it’s the best contest I can think of.

• Not every brand can put people on tv or the front of their catalogue but you can always run a traditional contest promotion. At this year’s eTail I heard someone from Ice.com talking about a few campaigns. His comments indicated that some promotions worked better than others at driving ROI but that most had good impression rates. For a jewelry company, something about posting your love story or why you deserve the perfect ring which people can vote on. For an online dating site, user submitted stories and experiences that let you win a romantic trip. For a software vendor, an example of art or a module created. For a show or movie, reactions from fans. And so forth. There’s an endless number of options of how to get these going and get them viral but the idea is to get people posting their own thoughts and expressions which they’ll want to share through any means available (email, social profiles, blogs, everything) and then let people vote or rate things to bring more activity and more involvement into the mix from the “fans”.

• Create your own videos and post them. It goes without saying that your videos need to be interesting, unique and posted to the right site but for a lot of companies that’s not a problem. Years ago I remember a dive business I worked with had an issue where their website got turned off for using too much bandwidth – people were viewing their video too much. At the time no one thought much of video and there wasn’t even an inkling of YouTube – bandwidth was at a premium too — but man, just think about that; too many views? Too much traffic? All this company did was posted an interested video on their site and the word spread all over dive forums and inboxes. What if they took that same (or a new video of a similar nature) and threw it onto a Dive Video site or YouTube or both? Put up a little profile, a link at the end and wrap the product in a bit and suddenly you’ve got a ton of exposure from something with a very low production cost. Even if only a minute fraction were to become customers that’s still a great branding opportunity and as was the case for this business, they were already shooting video so just about any sales would have made it profitable.

  If you can’t afford to shoot new footage but shoot for other mediums, consider repurposing or creating “b roll” footage. Repurposed video doesn’t tend to get as far although I’ve seen it get a few eyeballs but “b roll” can do really well, especially if it’s slightly humorous, shows a celebrity or is just unexpected. Coming from a world of “managed” brands it’s hard to think about showing your company’s goof ups, interactions or side remarks but that’s part of your face, your voice, and can lend great credibility to showing that you’re not just about overly priced commercials.

Forum communities: Involving yourself in most forms of social media is tricky but forums often take the cake. Successful forums are generally home to deeply attached members, long standing leaders and may be founded entirely without commercial goals making them difficult to approach both from a user and owner side. That’s probably why the best results come from companies that take the time to engage the forum owners/ leaders before they step in. Some promotion tactics may not require any formal discussions as many won’t require financial contribution but it’s always a good idea to introduce yourself, to find the lines and to get ideas from the leaders… asking them lets them know that you’re not here to push your name, you’re here to participate.

• The best way to get buzz on a forum is to participate and I do mean participate. The deeper the participation, the better the relationship, but even a casual conversation is a start. Just bare in mind that if your brand has a negative reputation, even if it’s mostly positive, you may open yourself up to a lot of bashing and will want to have a response strategy in place before you jump in. This shouldn’t scare you away from participating however – people are already talking about your brand and while responding may draw a few more flames, it’s also an opportunity to set the record straight, much like issuing a press release about an issue. When you participate by name you get the chance to explain your policies and offerings, your benefits and the reality of your business.

  But when you participate in a forum don’t limit yourself to just talking about your brand (unless requested by the site owners of course). Most companies have experts who know their fields and if you’re on a forum it’s because people are talking about the topics your brand knows about, so help others, respond and show your expertise. It’s amazing how positive this sort of interaction can be and chances are you don’t even have to mention your own url to get a benefit out of it. Just by having a username and signature that refers to your company gets you noticed but when you show that you’re an expert and valued resource willing to interact with customers, you’re showing them that you relate to their needs and aren’t just about keeping to the old-world relationship of customer and store. Chances are not everything you do is perfect but when you open up your brand to communicate with your customers, they tend to be grateful for it, and even if there’s some negativity, there’s generally a lot more positive reactions going on, even if they aren’t all stated.

  If you’ve got the resources, kick this up a notch and see if you can get your own forum, moderators or other means of being a fixture of the community if not a pillar. This ultimately means tying your brand to the community (you don’t have to be exclusive but if they go down in flames, you’ll have an issue) and it also means you have to get into the promotion side of things to get people using your area… luckily that generally means being active and useful rather than doing anything considered typical promotion.

• Supporting a forum in a visible way is a great way to get recognized and be seen as a positive influence rather than a negative one. Of course this can mean traditional banners but those are far less interesting than a deeper dive… say sponsoring contest by providing a trip or one of your products or building/ sponsoring a tool with your branded logo that powers it as opposed to just having a banner on the top of the page. This opens the door to you being seen as a part of the community rather than a logo on the top and extends your participation, if you are indeed participating.

• Many communities have a lot of photos, videos and other posted going on and if you’re working with these for other purposes, social or brand, they can be wonderful to repurpose on a forum. Pushing out photos of new product offerings, b-roll video from a shoot or extra shots of a item at a tradeshow or around the office is all great stuff to do on any viral site but when you do it on a forum, there’s a lot of chance for consumers to respond, to throw in their feedback and to start getting hyped up about the offering. You can tie in these postings with initial notification lists, find beta testers and get the word out quickly and easily.

• No matter what you do, even if it’s running banners, relate them to the forum and its needs from the message & creative to the landing page and the offer. Your forum campaign is likely going to be a whole lot different than the banners you may be running on portals or your AdWords campaign so don’t kill the experience when the user clicks off to your site. Instead build out messages that extend the experience and keep it obvious that you’re specifically working with this community so they feel like there’s a shared relationship when they hit your site. And that helps push them to convert.

On a final note about forums, while it is important to be willing to take some criticism and negative backlash, you also need to be careful about the community you chose to stick your neck out in. By their nature some communities are more apt to bash than others and some end up creating cultures that almost encourage ripping on companies. Unless there’s a serious shift that you want to get across, spending your time in a community that hates your company, or just likes to rip on all commercial entities isn’t the best use of time so do some evaluations before you reach out.

Social networking sites: They’re hot, super popular and according to the media, somewhere your company has to be. While the first two are definitely true, the third is something that really depends. To be crystal clear, I say this as an avid user of FaceBook, formerly of MySpace and a few other smaller social networks. While most of these sites have done a good job of branding into older demographics they still are not for every company and for many companies, getting into other social sites that fit a specified niche just makes more sense, even if the consumer base is larger on the top networks. However, if your brand is applicable, wow… the reach potential is amazing. The difficulty is finding ways to get people to you.

• Applications and widgets have become the hottest part of the social networking world in recent time but again, proceed with caution. This isn’t field of dreams… build it and they may come, or they may not, it needs to be interesting and that often means very little in the way of commercial. If you look at the top applications on FaceBook this is perfectly evident – there are no retail brands running top 10 apps. Sure these apps are almost all commercially developed but they’re developed for use and engagement which drive ad revenue, not brand recognition or sales.

  If you do decide to build your own application, be sure to do your homework first. There’s a lot of tools out there so it’s fairly rare to see something truly unique and if there’s already an app in your space that’s failing, ask yourself why (is it a bad app, poorly marketed or something great but there just isn’t interest). If you’re developing something new, get some feelers out there to see if there’s truly a marketplace and look at similar apps to help gauge how big it is. When it comes down to actually developing remember that apps do well when they’re subject to sharing and have a lot of collaborative elements. Building the coolest game in the world is great, if it centers around your value proposition that’s even better but if there’s no way for people to tell each other about it, it’s a lot less useful to you.

• If you can’t find the IT resources or don’t have a good pitch to create your own application, renting space or advertising in an existing application can be a great way to get exposure and unlike with your own app, you don’t have to attract the users. With so many applications out there, you want to be sure your partnership is actually beneficial so be sure to look at the number of people using a program as well as the pageview and unique visitor metrics. Unfortunately for advertisers, many of the apps on the market do very well at driving in revenue and may want CPMs that just can’t be justified but there are gems out there and with the right type of promotion, you can get some nice traffic out of the partnership. After all, who wouldn’t use a Victoria’s Secret sponsored superpoke or gift for Valentines?

• Applications aside, there’s a lot of content posting and information being exchanged on social networking sites. Be it questions on LinkedIn, Videos on MySpace & FaceBook, news articles, or whatever, if you have something that people want to share, you can drum up a lot of branded response. Video is especially good for this and if it’s popular, people will push it within their own networks. Of course the trick is to extend engagement to having your video link into your own micro-community (preferably on a social site) can help keep the conversation going.

• Applications, video, it’s all good for sharing but doesn’t tend to sell the brand enough. To really get people engaged, build your own profile/ micro-community and use your other social and viral techniques to drive people to it. Whether its friends on MySpace or Fans on FaceBook, when people join up you gain access to talk to them through updates to your page and messaging. You can also build out lists of key influencers who are willing to promote your page and brand and often come in as early adopters. Your page doesn’t have to be sponsored or amazingly fancy, although that may help if you can add the right tools, but it does need to fit the nature of the community. Provide information and elements people like as well as a reason for them to come back. This means updating your page with new content, photos, videos and other items that make your site useful… just like a personal profile and people will be more likely to come back or even better, to link up.

Whatever you do bare in mind that on most social networks, the new news feeds reigns supreme and is somewhere you have to be to get noticed. The great thing about news feeds is that you get in front of a second level of users and not just those who participate in your applications or feeds. Often times we forget to include enough updates in the news feed when releasing tools… not that you want every event to trigger a posting as that will drive your users and their networks nuts… but it’s a good idea to have major events show up.

Finally keep in mind that a lot of social networks and users on them have a strong emphasis on being more cooperative and helpful. If your brand is going green, volunteering or doing anything else to help the world, be involved in political issues or the community you really want to share that on your social networking presence. This isn’t about exploiting your good actions but rather about sharing them so people understand your brand’s true identity and possibly dive in themselves. If you can tap in to the pay it forward mentality you and your good cause will benefit.

The Infamous Blogs: When blogs first hit the market and I’d refer to blog communities I got a lot of puzzled looks, now it makes more sense. Blogs are not only an amazing force to be respected but they’ve developed a very strong community of their own. Some of this community is tied to a specific site and some of it to the blogging world as a whole. The more webmaster focused blogs take this even further and really have evolved into a world where people know each other across blogs and into other online communities so while getting into a blog may seem like just getting onto another content site, there’s really a lot more two it.

• Much like a pr campaign, what you really want out of blogs is people talking about you (preferably in a positive way). This can mean talking about your new products, your special campaign or your corporation. You could be on blogs about your niche, about new products, about the stock market, or even about how you treat your customers and their experience (you could even be included here). All if these blog topics have different, although often overlapping, audiences and communities to reach into, it’s just a matter of finding as many relevant ones as possible and making sure that information on you. Much like with a classic press campaign, this can mean courting bloggers, sending out product samples or just giving people the heads up so they can do their own research. You can meet bloggers at shows, invite them to the office for a tour or just let them know how to reach you if they have questions. Often times the best and most visible posts will come from people you didn’t talk to and may never have followed, that’s just the nature of being in the public, but these posts aren’t something you can count on so keeping up a relationship is key to maintaining a stream of information. Just don’t push to be blogged about too often… the blog writer isn’t likely to be happy about being harassed and even if they don’t mention it, you don’t want a third party blog turning into your defacto media source.

• If you can’t get enough free postings about you, there’s always the option of paying people to post in cold hard cash. While there are a lot of commercial blogs, there’s also a big reaction to paid posts so don’t try and mask your efforts, that’s been done and blown up in the face of many companies. Instead if you want to pay people to blog about you, pay them to review your products, pay them for their honesty. Being paid makes it difficult to be truly honest but if you create a policy (and let it become public) that limits your editorial rights and influence, people tend to be much more apt to trust the postings.

• Running your own blog is a great way to get into other blogs as well. Why? Because much of blogging is about reading other sites and talking about them, sharing items from them, even linking to them if they make sense. Writing a corporate blog takes a couple of jumps through legal and you have to be willing to act quickly as you can’t spend weeks formulating every post but if you’re willing to get good information out there and talk about what’s going on, the new, the good, and sometimes the ugly, it has a great way of finding its way onto other sites, into blog comments and even picked up on by the media.

A lot more (a whole lot more) could be said about blogs but this post is already way too long so I’ll leave that for another day.

I opened with a rule so it’s fitting that I close with a rule as well. When you go viral you really need to think about how the internet world perceives your brand. I don’t know the exact details but I remember hearing about a Chevy or GM campaign (it may have been another American car company) that let people compile a video using clips from one of its commercials. The problem – the video was for a big truck and many of the users were, well, to put it in a “pc” way, environmentally friendly. This may seem like a no-brainer in 2008 with $4++++ gas prices but a few years ago trucks were still selling hard. The problem was they also had a strong resentment from a base that is very well connected online and found a great opportunity to voice it’s opinion… right on the car’s front page as I recall. The lesion here, know how people will respond before you let them go out and do as they please otherwise you may be really embarrassed.

As a final note I’m sure you noticed a few missing types of communities/ social sites but rest assured, I’ll address them soon enough.